The Colour of His Hair

by David Rees

  He grimaced. ‘I’d rather not.’

  Helen was amused. ‘You’ve never understood it, have you!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Donald says the world’s divided into two classes of people, chamber-pot users and chamber-pot washers. One group uses them, the other cleans them out. He blithely admits he’s not one of the washers.’

  ‘Typical of the way his mind works! Grasping at a plain clear-cut definition when the truth of the matter is so complex there aren’t any adequate words to define It at all!’

  ‘Another of his ideas,’ Helen said, ‘is that people can be classified as dogs or cats. He’s a cat. You and I and Mark are dogs.’

  ‘We have this semi-detached house in East Finchley, two children, several goldfish, one smelly rather moth-eaten rabbit, a clapped-out car, and all the usual domestic articles and problems. A dog’s life? All we’ve done is to join the bourgeoisie!’

  ‘Don’t forget that we aren’t married, and that one of our children is therefore born out of wedlock, while the other isn’t even yours. Because I can’t be bothered to get a divorce, and somewhere in Europe there’s Philip, my husband, who, out of the generosity of his guilt complexes, gave me a house. Which we sold in order to buy this one. No, it doesn’t mean we’re dogs. Or lead a dog’s life.’

  ‘Well… we all have to have some differentiating signs, I suppose. Just to make sure we exist.’

  ‘Donald has some childish notion he and Mark can still be friends! Occasionally go out together for a meal, or an evening in one of their pubs or clubs. What that really means is he still hopes he has a life-line.’

  ‘Fuck them both!’ Brian said. The subject bores me rigid. Come here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just come here.’

  ‘Yes. O Lord and Master.’

  She is more lined than she used to be, he thought, under the eyes when she smiles. The same raven black hair. A calmer person. Self-assured. The maturity shows in the way she thinks and talks, the letters she writes. She’s grown almost beyond recognition. ‘I think … I shall take your clothes off and make love to you on the hearth-rug,’ he said. ‘For old times’ sake … and the children are out.’

  ‘Old times’ sake?’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten, at the age of seventeen on your parents’ hearth-rug?’

  ‘No. What would the bourgeoisie say?’

  ‘Retire with their discreet charm behind shut curtains.’ Helen shut the curtains.

  A year previously her parents had moved from Croydon to North London; Dad had decided there could be more opportunities for his work, Chris Price Disposals. ‘One suburb, Jane, is much like any other,’ he remarked cheerfully when Mum was expressing doubts on the subject of living in Tottenham. ‘And you’ll be much nearer to Helen and to Donald.’ It was the nearness to Donald that worried her. Though they both got on well with him up to a point, Donald had an odd effect on his father when they were living in close contact. It was the homosexuality that disturbed Chris; my son, my only son, he would often say to himself in moods of self-pity. The thought of no grandchildren bearing his surname made him feel uneasy. Inferior: it was a kind of slur on his maleness. The fact that Helen had two delightful children seemed to make no difference.

  In Mark’s opinion, Chris and Jane appeared at a superficial level to accept his and Donald’s homosexuality completely, but he didn’t really trust them. They needed to be liked too much, needed to impress him with their kindness and tolerant liberalism. Surrounded by his and Donald’s friends (Donald’s twenty-first birthday party was a typical example) they conveyed the idea ― tacitly and not so tacitly ― that they ought to be regarded as an intriguing and unconventional couple, admirable in their generosity to a bunch of faggots. He couldn’t help noticing in all the photographs Chris took at that party there was not one of him and Donald together. He was certain that if anything went disastrously wrong Chris and Jane would drop him instantly, and welcome Donald’s new boyfriend. It was impossible for them to take the relationship as totally serious, however long it might last, simply because it was homosexual. When he and Donald first lived together, the only thing Chris and Jane had given them was an old bookcase that was going to be chopped up for firewood, whereas they were lavish with wedding presents to Helen.

  Donald sought his parents’ advice when he decided to do that something drastic and leave Mark. They couldn’t make sense of his reasons, couldn’t grasp the idea that Rick was not just a straight swop for Mark. Donald’s vague talk of freedom, of being inside a cage, of wanting to live out of a suitcase and find himself, was alarming. ‘The trouble with homosexual relationships,’ Chris said, ‘is that they don’t last. Always end in tears. It’s tragic!’

  Donald looked at his mother, but she said nothing. She would compromise in any way to avoid argument: Chris had been drinking steadily again for some years. ‘Not all heterosexual marriages last,’ he said. ‘And you can’t say yours has been absolutely smooth.’

  ‘More credit to us,’ Dad answered, ‘for making it work. Particularly when it seemed to everybody else that it wouldn’t last five minutes. Well… if it’s all over, you make sure you get that watch back.’

  ‘What are you talking about?7

  ‘The watch you let him wear. He’s had it for years and it’s the property of this family. Belonged to my grandfather. You make sure you get it back.’

  Donald winced. ‘Yes, Dad.’

  Chris stood up and smiled. A heavily-built Falstaffian man: truculent and disturbed now, but at other times charming, the life and soul of any party. ‘I’m going out’ he said, and, intercepting his wife’s anxious look, added with more emphasis than was necessary, ‘to put some water in the car radiator.’

  Jane said, when he had left, ‘Bring Rick over here one evening. I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘Yes, maybe I will,’ Donald replied, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Donald … what is wrong?’

  He was silent for a while, then said, ‘Maybe I could move in here for a bit. Till I get myself sorted out.’

  ‘Of course. Any time. We’d love you to.’

  Mark’s discovery of the truth occurred one day when he came home early from work, feverish and unwell: a stomach upset. He went to the bathroom, wondering if he was going to vomit. A few minutes later he heard Donald arrive at the flat with Rick; though they knew he must be somewhere nearby because his car was parked outside, they made no attempt to behave with any discretion. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ Donald said eventually, ‘as soon as I can make it.’ Rick left.

  Mark’s heart was thumping uncomfortably and he felt dizzy; never before had he overheard his lover having an orgasm with somebody else. Donald came into the bathroom, naked, and said, ‘I thought you must have gone out for a walk. Are you O.K?’ He looked guilty and frightened.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Are you having an affair with Rick?’

  ‘No.’

  Don’t lie! Have you had sex with Rick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look at your hands. And your cock.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m old enough to recognize sperm when I see it.’

  ‘Yes, then. If you insist. But nothing … important.’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  Donald steadied himself before answering, and said, trying to look Mark straight in the eye, ‘I don’t know. Sexually, he turns me on … fantastically.’

  ‘You mean you don’t enjoy making love with me?’

  ‘It’s different.’

  ‘How, different?’

  Donald, a slight crossness in his voice, said, ‘Do you remember the first words I ever spoke to you? Years ago in the school changing-room? You were putting one one of your rare appearances in that place, and you were being teased about the huge size of your balls. As big as plums, I remember thinking, and they dangle. I said “I envy you a pair like that.” That’s what it’
s been about ever since!’

  ‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’

  ‘Sex! I’d been dying to have a cock shoved up my arse since I was thirteen! I used to wank myself senseless just thinking about it! And you wanted to shove it there! Oh, it was fantastic, certainly; I couldn’t get enough of it. Nor could you. The way we trembled and groaned and begged each other to stop; we were coming, coming, coming! On one occasion my sperm actually hit the ceiling! But you would talk about love and ecstasy and love again —’

  ‘This is all lies. You’re rewriting history.’

  ‘You made me feel it was only permissible if it was love; that’s what I resent! You talked me into thinking it was there when it wasn’t … all that jelly-like, quivering emotion! When really it was screwing. Why couldn’t you ever think of it as just two boys giving each other gorgeous sensations with their hands and mouths and cocks and arseholes?’

  ‘You’re only saying this so you can leave me more easily.’

  ‘Perhaps. All right. Yes. There was love, I suppose. Yes, I did love you. Once upon a time. But I’m so bored with you now! Every time I want sex, you’re at the ready, like … like a tom-cat on heat. Where’s the fun, the hunt, the chase, the thrill? It’s gone!’ His voice rose to a shout. ‘Didn’t ever exist!’

  ‘You’ll get AIDS.’

  ‘Not if I take the right precautions.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where’s the condom Rick’s just used?’

  ‘On the bedroom floor.’

  ‘So Rick, with a rubber, is preferable to me without?’

  ‘Yes! A thousand times yes! It’s exciting, and wonderful, and different! Mark … I’m leaving you. For good. Christ! I didn’t want it to turn out like this! But I’m going! I must, I must! I must be free of this place, of you… How I hate this flat! This … this jail sentence! We’ve been together so long and since we were so young I just don’t know who I am or what I’m capable of, and I’ve got to find out! I’m going, and I’m going now!’ He turned and went into the bedroom, got dressed, then pulled two carrier bags out of a cupboard and started to fill them with clothes. Mark followed him from room to room, watching, astonished. Donald opened the front door.

  ‘Donald…’ Mark raised his arms, gently.

  ‘Don’t touch me. Please.’

  A thin light drizzle had begun, grey shawls and veils of it drifting along the street. Donald walked off, in the direction of Rick’s flat.

  Where he stayed for a month. The worst month, Mark was able to think later, of the whole messy revolting procedures of break-up. It was the geographical proximity that was so hard to accept, so … unkind. It meant he was constantly aware of Donald’s movements; it would have been much easier if his lover had emigrated to the other side of the earth or just dropped dead. For it was worse than a physical wound or a bereavement; it could not heal, was made to fester daily, almost hourly. Though Mark could not see the flat from his bedroom, it was only just out of sight. He had to pass it on the way to work, and he usually knew whether Donald was there or not, for Jane lent him her car, the now elderly red Fiat. This car became an obsession for Mark. He would spend hours driving around, looking for it; and on two occasions he nearly caused what might have been a serious accident through not paying proper attention to the driver in front. Why he wanted to find it he couldn’t really fathom: just to see them together? Make some kind of dramatic fuss? But he rarely saw it, not even outside the nearest gay pub, the Black Cap, haunt of many of their friends: perhaps Donald was ashamed of the gossip that might ensue. Mark thought people regarded his relationship with Donald as a paragon. He was proud of their respect, needed it. It would wither. He did not want to be one of the unattached, frequenting bars every night; wallflowers in his opinion, secretaries thrown back into the typing pool, while Donald happily enjoyed moving at once into another affair: and the break-up, he thought, would spread a sense of unease, remind their friends of the jibes of straights that homosexual relationships were in their very nature shallow and brittle.

  On the day he told Ted Viner what had happened, he saw them. He’d met Ted for lunch, and was driving him back to Victoria when the Fiat turned out of a side road just ahead; Donald’s arm was lying along the top of Rick’s seat, his hand stroking Rick’s neck. Mark skidded to a halt. Ted got out of the car: ‘Move over,’ he said; ‘I’ll drive.’ He drove up to Hampstead Heath, and they looked down on London. It was a rare, warm day: hazy sunshine, cloud shadows moving slowly across the rich pattern of grass, woods, water, and the grey structures of the city.

  ‘People have lived here for over two thousand years,’ Ted said. ‘Don’t think your suffering is unlike anybody else’s.’

  ‘I don’t. But that doesn’t make it better.’

  ‘It’s your city too. You’ve roots here. Don’t let yourself be hustled away from it.’

  ‘Fuck the city! Fuck roots!’

  Ted did not answer, but took him to the car and drove to Croydon, to his own house, which he now shared with Jason.

  They plied him with so much scotch that he had to stay the night. He slept, anaesthetised by the alcohol. Usually he didn’t, despite taking valium before he went to bed; it worked, in that he would fall asleep easily enough but woke after a few hours, and finding the other half of the bed empty, he would be instantly awake, two a.m., three a.m., no warm body of Donald breathing a heart-beat away, and he was quite unable to sleep again. Sometimes he lay there till sunrise, still too shocked by the hurt even to think. Once he got up and finished painting the spare bedroom. But mostly he would go out and aimlessly drive the car or walk the streets, hovering by Rick’s house if the Fiat was parked there, and wonder which of those darkened rooms his lover and Rick were sleeping in.

  Over the years he had at times become bored with Donald in bed, but he had not indulged in any adventure on the side. Sometimes he flirted with other men, and knowing that a few might sleep with him if he asked, he would say to himself, why am I doing this? He didn’t want it: there was, really, only Donald. He remembered one occasion at a disco being very attracted to a beautiful blond boy, the best dancer on the floor, and having talked to him, discovering that sex would be a possibility, and dancing with him to If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody, baby, he realised that the song said: if I can’t have Donald I don’t want nobody. And he said no to the beautiful blond.

  To think that he meant nothing to Donald, physically, not just at this moment, but for ever, was an appalling blow to his self-esteem. Would everyone find him unattractive now? Was he simply unattractive, period? One of the worst aspects of gay life, he said to Ted, was that it was so youth-orientated: slim young bodies, unlined fresh faces ― so many people valued them more than stability, love. His waist-line was bigger; his hair receding: for some ― many ― gay men he might just as well not exist.

  ‘What shit he talks!’ Jason said, when Mark had driven home on Sunday morning. ‘Why should he think stability with a man who doesn’t love him preferable to a condom and a beautiful boy for the night? Why does he think we look on his relationship with Donald as some exemplar of virtue? It isn’t. Never was! Why does he have to ape heterosexual patterns all the time?’

  ‘He can’t face the idea of being alone,’ Ted answered.

  ‘There are two things I want in a lover ― a body that turns me on; and if we have to part we part as friends. If you live together it presumably helps if you like doing similar things, and can respect each other’s space when you want to be by yourself. All the rest is so much crap, and the crappiest crap is looking for someone else to give you security. Like all neurotic obsessions it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy ― you end up getting precisely what you’re afraid of most. It’s time Mark grew up.’

  ‘Oh … big speech!’

  Jason grinned. ‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘Why on earth is it I find complete happiness living with a man who’s old enough to be my father? Who put me in deten
tion when I was twelve because I’d forgotten to do my English homework? Who wouldn’t lay a finger on me ― because he was dead scared ― until I’d left school, even though he knew I was dying for it and was madly in love with him?’

  ‘Luck,’ Ted said. ‘The sheer chance of things. And … if I remember rightly … I didn’t keep you waiting that long.’

  TWO

  ‘But how did it happen?’ Helen asked.

  He rang me up at work, and suggested we go out for a meal―’

  ‘Which you paid for, I suppose.’

  ‘― and we had this amazing, fabulous, unbelievably great evening!’ Mark laughed, and looked out of the window. Then we went back to the flat and made superb love. Yes, love, not sex. I’m not so stupid nor so inexperienced that I can’t tell the difference! I don’t remember anything like it for months. I almost said years … but that wouldn’t be true. And he’s still there, in the flat. A week now! Though … it isn’t the same. I don’t know what’s wrong: he won’t discuss things as we used to. He’s very depressed. But he did talk about Rick. It was such a relief to find I hadn’t been replaced, if you know what I mean. I begin to be sorry for the boy! He became too insistent, Donald says; too clinging.’

  The one thing Donald keeps reiterating, the one little fixture in all the confusion whirling about in his mind, is that he doesn’t want a relationship: no ties, no responsibilities. With anyone.’

  ‘I don’t understand you. He’s there!’ Mark said. ‘What’s he doing, then? Just doesn’t feel like going to your parents’ house, doesn’t feel like making the effort to get a place of his own, so he plumps for the easiest solution?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why … it’s evil! Has he been here? Has he talked to you?’

  Helen poured herself another drink and sipped it before answering. ‘Mark, I won’t be a post office where you and Donald mail letters to each other.’

  ‘But… ?’

  She was silent for a while, then said, ‘The usual talk about the need for freedom.’